Photoprism is the self-hosted photo/video library that does it all for me. It has labeling of images so you can search by picture content, it has calendar and map features for more natural finding of the pictures you're trying to find and it lets you have public/private content as you choose. To be clear, I want our reliance on huge mega-corps to be gotten rid of. I don't think that necessarily implies some form of neo-luddism or that we should have to deal with worse products. We get what we create and support, and this project is definitely worthy of both. Pictures are some of the most personal things we routinely create so we should try protect these moments from prying eyes. Moreover, with Google Photos continuing to degrade their product by reneging on their promise of free unlimited storage and by silently degrading your picture quality an alternative should be welcomed!
From self-hosting Photoprism, I've found it to be quite a smooth process relative to the size and scale of its features. The one process I found difficult to get working was one of the most crucial however; syncing with my Android phone. I mostly take 35mm analog pictures (because I'm insufferable) but I appreciate being able to scroll back through my screenshots for conversations with friends and taking a quick picture on the go. I found Photoprism's guide however lacking to solve the use case of my phone automatically uploading new content to Photoprism and having it imported ready for viewing, so I tried a few different apps and settled on FolderSync.
FolderSync allows you to sync files between different locations on your phone or use WebDAV to sync with an external location. Photoprism supports WebDAV so this should be a cinch! I decided to set up one folder on my device that would one-way upload to Photoprism and then locally sync any files in other media folders on my phone to that folder. This might be a needless step, but I think it's useful for supporting multiple different ingestion locations and also optionally not indiscriminately syncing all media from your phone with a potentially public library! From screenshots, my FolderSync setup looks something like this for SD Card Sync:
And for WebDAV we have the following:
Using these, you should be able to set up automatic photo syncing from your Android phone to Photoprism! If you have any issues, refer back to the Photoprism guide for this topic as it's definitely more up to date, thorough, and useful than this short post. However, I strongly recommend FolderSync over their suggestions of PhotoSync and SMBSync2!